It's so dark, it's very hard to tell what parts, or how much of the contest source you've used.
You may want to consider some judicious cropping, to make your use of the contest source more of the focal point in this image. Right now there is too much background, and too little contest source...
Also think about straightening out your horizon line. It's presently tilting down to the RH side...
The basket is too sharp edged in comparison to the rounded edges of the rest of the sculpture.
By comparison, the "neck" of the sculpture where the head was removed is too soft and rounded, making it look lumpy and somewhat "melted." A bit sharper "break" edge would better convey the headlessness. You may also want to clone in some of the leaf pattern behind the neck to better blend the space with the background.
To get rid of the sharp edged basket, try to use a little bit Gaussian Blur. Or just use the Blur Tool. A little lighting to the "neck" should make an illusion to the headless stone. Btw, where's the so called Crow? It's too dark to see the crow standing by the "neck". Try to add a little highlights to the Crow's feathers that reflect the lights/sun rays.
The neck looks much better, but now you've increased the overall contrast too much, making the brights look "blown out" to almost pure white, which really makes the ground look bad, almost like a poor infra-red effect...
Also, although you've now softened the basket, it shows NO highlights to correspond to the rest of the statue. You may have to hand paint those in with either the Paintbrush, or the Dodge tool.
Perhaps you should add a bit of the green color of the foliage back into the image?
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good idea -- masking could use some touch up around the hair, and the top of the dress -- the black seems a bit over powering and is not allowing any of the underlying texture to show as it does on the rest of the colours -- different blend mode or adjust the fill and or opacity may help.
Howdie stranger! If you want to rate this picture or participate in this contest, just:
Howdie stranger!
If you want to rate this picture or participate in this contest, just:
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